


Casablanca, August 2008

by orphan_account



Category: Leverage, NCIS
Genre: Canon Jewish Character, Collection: Purimgifts Day 2, Community: purimgifts, Competency, Gen, POV Female Character, Pre-Canon, Season/Series 06, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-15
Updated: 2014-03-15
Packaged: 2018-01-15 20:42:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1318528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A woman of a false name is approached by a man of no name at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Casablanca, August 2008

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ariestess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariestess/gifts).



 

 

 

There is a man at the end of the bar, a White man whose body speaks of violence, though his face is kind. He nurses a soda, his fingers closed around the glass gently. He’s the only White man in the bar who doesn’t order a beer. He’s also the only White man who’s discreet in staring at Célestine Farouk, her lapis-blue gown sparking against her mocha skin. Célestine mesmerizes all eyes to her, and what her figure doesn’t do, her voice does.

Célestine Farouk is but a stage name. Most men in the bar know that. This man - so thinks the woman known as Célestine - knows that it’s more than that. This man knows what’s behind the mask of Célestine, and that’s not a Moroccan girl who crossed the strait to learn to sing.

Célestine gives her show. After, she mingles with the patrons, just so. She smiles. She is charming. She ignores the man at the end of the bar, who is still nursing a soda. She doesn’t think it’s the same one. He’s better than that.

She doesn’t see him leave. He’s there, waiting for her, when she enters her room.

“I could kill you six different ways before you get out of that chair,” Ziva David says, matter of fact.

“I know,” he acknowledges. “I’m not here to die.”

“Then what are you here for?” she snaps. She doesn’t trust his apparent reasonableness; he could be aiming to lull her into a false sense of safety.

“Ask for a favor,” he says.

She doesn’t move to put a knife against his throat. She does redistribute her weight. He’s good enough that he should see her poise even in the near-darkness of the room, just the street lights filtering in through the curtains.

“Bashir Abu-Hassan. I’d appreciate if I could ask him a few questions, when you’re done with him.”

Abu-Hassan is but a secondary objective. It’s his boss that she’s here to eliminate. She has no need to eliminate Abu-Hassan - in fact, the preferred tact is to leave him alive; better to have a known variable take over, one that Mossad is already positioned to control.

This man - the accent and the training are American, but he is no Government, she doesn’t think - has no need to know that.

Ziva kicks off Célestine’s shoes and crosses the room. She drops into the other chair sideways, and lifts her legs to rest them over the armrest. The position exposes a knife strapped to her thigh. It says, _I let you know that I carry this, because this is not all that I carry._

She says: “I don’t like the idea of a favor. I don’t know that I will ever see you again, now, do I?”

“I’m not hearing a ‘no’,” the man says, unfazed.

“We trade. I need a phone call made, two days from now.”

He doesn’t blink, but a sliver of light falls on his face, lets her read his expression: he knows what the phone call really is, knows that he will need to be very fast, very good, to wipe out the trail that might tell anyone he was the one who activated the trigger - the trigger of a bomb that, she knows, he won’t ask her where it’s planted.

He is not one of those who need to do.

He relaxes into the chair, and says: “Then I suppose I need the phone.”


End file.
